I think you are missing the point, but just barely: software is a set of instructions, like formulae are. Formulae are instructions on how to reach a sum, and software is a set of instructions on how to set circuits inside a computer. They are alike, but not entirely the same.
Close, but not quite. Software is a set of instructions on how to reach a mathematical result. You will not find anything in the definition of an x86 ADD instruction that refers to circuits or necessarily requires them. You can perform that ADD instruction completely correctly using a software simulator, or even by hand. The only difference between the language of math in a textbook and the language of math in a software instruction set is that the latter is designed to be read by a computer, but this need not be the case.
Computer vs human readability. That's the only difference between software and hand-written mathematical instructions. Both are formulas, both are math.
The other thing to realise is the magnitude of complexity in software means that emergence kicks in: the set of instructions begins to behave like a physical object, and engineering approaches gradually apply. Sure, there are maths in there, but it's no longer so relevant to the design of the set of instructions. Refining and redesigning the code becomes more analogue to engineering, redesigning a structure for better performance and so on.
Complexity will never make math not-math. Emergency is an aspect of math, not an escape from it. Of course you will be concerned with the physical practicalities of your formula, that doesn't mean a formula is now something else. Or have you never re-factored a hand-written algorithm to be more efficient or convenient to calculate by hand? The initial justification for the electronic computer was because human computers weren't fast enough at calculating artillery trajectories. How did changing from doing the calculations with pen and paper and a human brain, to doing them by an electronic device, change those calculations from a formula to a not-formula? What about when they decided to increase efficiency by hiring whole rooms of computers (in the original sense of a human being tasked with computation), is that when it became not-math?
It's easy to forget this since the first purpose of computers was to compute. Solve mathematical problems. But modern usage of these machines has gone beyond that, so seeing the set of instructions we call software as merely mathematical formulae cheapens the term "formula".
It's easy to forget that that's all a computer program is doing today. Thanks to hardware some of those calculations have effects other than the simple computation, but the software has no idea that when it assigns a value to a particular location in a matrix that a piece of hardware is going to use that value to control the output of a cathode ray tube. As far as the software is concerned -- and more importantly, defined -- it's doing nothing but calculations and assignments. Frankly I think you're the one cheapening the term "formula" by limiting it to simple hand-written calculations of sums.
There's no reason every person on earth needs an IP. Nat+uPNP is perfectly capable and 100% backwords compatible.
Yeah, unless you still hold out hopes that the internet could live up to its original promise of being a network of peers, where a person's home computer could be their server when they are out.
Throwing people behind ever increasing layers of NAT erodes the functionality of the internet. If your goal is simply to disprove that IP addresses are running out, that may be acceptable. If you don't want to turn the internet into a series of essentially uni-directional gateways, then it isn't.
I want a static IP. And it's not even an unreasonable request, we have the solution right here, it's just going to take time to get adopted. So what's yer beef?
As a fan of the book, that really kind of pissed me off. They started off by teasing us with a few moments of the single very best depiction of phalanx combat ever put to film and then abandonded it for the rest of the movie.
In the book they NEVER broke formation. That was practically the whole point of the story. Hell, that was practically the whole point of the entire fucking Spartan civilization!*
You're kidding me... So that was the director/screenwriter, not Frank Miller. Well that's good to know. Maybe I'll give the comic a read some time.
One will insist that, no matter how much memory is currently allocated, it makes more sense to swap out that which isn't needed in order to keep more free physical ram. They will argue until they are blue in the face that the benefits of doing so are good. Essentially - your OS is clever and it tries pre-emptively swap things out so the memory will be available as needed.
Not exactly... It doesn't swap things out so the memory is free just in case an active application decides it needs it. The OS pre-emptively swaps things out so that the memory can be immediately used for useful things like a file cache (which can be instantly discarded in case an application needs it).
If the page utilization and file caching algorithms work correctly for your usage pattern, then this is undoubtedly a benefit to performance. And the algorithms are good, so they do apply to a wide variety of cases. Hopefully I don't have to argue until I'm blue in the face to convince you of this.
I run most of my workstations (Windows) without virtual memory. Yes, on occasion, I do hit a "low on virtual memory error" - usually when something is leaky - but I prefer to get the error and have to re-start or kill something rather than have the system spend days getting progressively slower, slowly annoying me more and more, and then giving me the same error.
The days where swap was used primarily to increase the effective amount of memory you had for running applications are long gone. It made some sense back then, for several reasons. First, even when 16MB was considered "a lot", few people considered it enough. Having a way to use more was handy when running Paint Shop Pro. Second, the relative speed of disk and memory was closer than it is today. Not exactly close, but a lot closer than today. Third, the amount of memory being handled was smaller. Disks speed has increased nearly as quickly as disk size and memory size. So doubling your effective memory by swapping that entire 16MB to disk is a much, much faster operation than doing the same with 1GB of RAM today.
But I agree with what you are saying regarding those actual low-memory situations and how you'd much rather kill them before they got around to needed all that disk space for swap. I have two thoughts on that. One is that old rules of thumb like "use swap equal to your physical RAM" need to go. You don't need 2GB of swap space if you have 2GB of RAM. You wouldn't want to use that much swap in most cases. I use a value like 256MB.
My second thought is that it might be a good idea to separate these two usage models of swap. Being able to swap out unused application pages to make room for file cache can be a good thing. Using swap because an application is demanding more memory than is physically available is probably not what you want, and is a great way to end up with an unresponsive thrashing system. It would be nice to be able to have the first feature, but have the application in the second case get an out of memory error. This thought, though, is pretty half-baked, so I'm not exactly going to go email my nearest kernel developer with the idea.
I'm not "brainwashed" by bad examples. I'm talking about, and am only against, as I explicitly stated, the bad examples.
Feeding someone today, at the cost of the right for them to control their own food sources in the future, and eliminating the foundation of millennia of agriculture in the right to plant seeds from last year's crop, is not "good work". It's an act of cruelty and enslavement. It's the "good work" of the devil, taking advantage of the desperate in order to control them. Some African countries have been rejecting aid that came in the form of Monsanto's Terminator breeds for exactly that reason.
When we aren't talking about DRMed food, then it's a completely different story. But right now, that's not the story the largest GM crop producer wants to tell.
The newly-created one that has the huge incentive of customer demand for cheaper products.
Oh yes, I forget that in Free Market Theory, a new company will spontaneously spring into existence regardless of any barriers to entry either inherent in the industry or set up by the trust in question. And, despite the fact that in this universe the SEC doesn't exist, this new company isn't immediately purchased, or simply bribed into colluding with the others.
Reality doesn't work that way. Maybe, eventually, that will happen, but in the mean time a great deal of damage has been done. Damage that could have been prevented just by eliminating the broken corner case.
The problem with this whole debate is the pragmatic, unprincipled approach taken by everyone opposing the free market
Principles without pragmatism are worse than useless, not only do they as a matter of course fail to achieve the principled objective, they frequently result in the opposite outcome. For example, the principle behind anarcho-capitalism is maximal freedom for all with minimal restrictions, but it's a system that essentially turns into feudalism very quickly. When contract law is the only law, creating a serfdom is as easy as finding people who don't have the option to leave and negotiate with someone else for the necessities you provide.
By promoting the violation of Google's employee's rights through government intervention, you promote the violation of your own rights.
But I don't think I have the "right" to form an abusive trust any more than I think I have the "right" to own slaves, so I'm not worried if violating that "right" of the people Google means I will lose that "right" too.
Or is this a slippery slope argument? If anti-trust laws are enforced, if banks and securities are regulated, then naturally this means I'll lose my freedom of religion? What is the basis for that? Is it not more likely that this would only encourage the violation of some related rights, which many of us may not consider to be rights at all?
What we really need is more research into GM crops which the environmentalists hate for some reason.
I consider myself an environmentalist, but I'm not against GM crops per-se. I'm against the most prominent examples of how they've actually been implemented and the companies responsible.
Basically, it comes down to this: If DRM is a bad idea for software, it's a fucking insanely retarded thing for food crops.
Not only did I invent a device which would correctly diagnose cancer 99.999% of the time, not only did it work in only half an hour, it also didn't involve any of this expensive magnetic nanotechnology la-dee-dah. Plus the device was so ridiculously simple anybody could use it, which you'll see once I describe the device itself.
Basically it's a big box, kinda like a front-loading washing machine. In front of the box is the scanning aperture. On top of the box is a single button labeled "Detect Cancer". You stand in front of the scanning aperture, and you hit the button. Over the next half hour, the box scans you with very high levels of x-rays. Once the scanning was done the only other feature on the top of the box, a green LED with a label that says "Cancer Detected", would light up.
You see, so simple a child could use it! I should know, too, because I had some try it out. But those bastards at the FDA brushed me off, even threatening me if I continued performing clinical trials! Even after I showed them it had the same accuracy detecting radiation burns and radiation sickness! But what do you expect from bureaucrats? More concerned with their "rules" and "regulations" than helping people. I wouldn't be surprised if this new one gets a pass because being hard to build and complicated to use they can regulate the hell out of it, even if it is inferior.:(
You might think it's common sense that marketshare is all that matters, but we hammered this out years ago when comparing attack rates on IIS vs Apache.
Obviously marketshare is a factor. Ease of infiltration is another factor. A more popular platform will be attacked less if the chance of success is lower, because at the end of the day going after the weaker but less popular platform can still net you more compromised systems. If you only look at desktop browsers and OSes, you might not think this is the case, but that's only because right now the most popular program and the most vulnerable program are the same, and that the up-and-coming browser can only claim to be better than the most popular one on security issues, not actually good.
In any case, common sense should not be telling you that the security of the program doesn't affect the number of hacks and viruses. Making the reasonable assumption that all code contains some number of bugs does not in any way imply that they are equally prevalent or equally easy to find in any given program, or that the time to discover the bugs is always the same and dependent only on desire. Exploring esoteric avenues of investigation because the incentive is so high does not guarantee a timely result. If it takes substantial time and effort to find an exploit, which is then fixed, requiring another substantial effort to find another exploit, then it may not be in the hackers interest to go after this target versus a lower profile one where exploits can be found faster and more frequently in spit of bug fixes.
Put succinctly: "the amount of hacks and viruses and malware on an os/ browser has absolutely nothing to do with anything other than marketshare" is trivially wrong, at its simplest you could say that the number of hacks and viruses is related to (marketshare * vulnerability).
In fact, I'd call it one of the truest representations of the ancient Greek epic storytelling style to ever see the big screen. Since I'm guessing that was the whole point, I'm gonna go ahead and call the movie really damn good, not just as an action movie, but as an expression of art.
Disagree? Go look at the fight scenes in the Iliad and watch the movie again with that in mind. The somewhat fantastic animals, the way the heroes were larger-than-life, the fights over a fallen comrade, the caricatured enemy--it is exactly the way you'd expect a somewhat-talented ancient Greek storyteller to handle the tale.
Well that's all true, except the part where that makes it good. I had no problem with the fantastic battles or historical inaccuracies in and of themselves. It's that the result was, while pretty and kinda fun in parts, still mostly boring and pointless. "Done in the style of..." doesn't automatically make something good even if they do accurately ape the style. After all there was crap Greek storytelling too.
Okay, and I'll admit, I just really couldn't get over the way the traitor was handled. The King makes a big point of how he would be happy to have the aid of the deformed man's strong spear arm, but alas, he can't raise his shield arm well and the Spartans always fight in phalanxes, don't you know, where the man next to you depends on your shield, so sorry it just wouldn't work. Then the battle starts and they fight in phalanx formation for maybe five seconds before voluntarily abandoning it to fight bar-brawl style. I can't remember any times where someone's shield was used to protect someone other than the one holding it.
Not that I have a problem with them not fighting in formation; it was a video game beat-em-up (complete with boss fight) on the big screen. I don't care if they fight in phalanxes or not. But they shouldn't mention that piece of unnecessary historical accuracy as part of a pivotal plot point only to ignore it five minutes later. The King should have just said that hey, we'd love to have you, except Spartan warriors represent the pinnacle of the human form who fight using magic spear-fu, and you're a mutant freak. Then at least it would have been consistent.
Also, copyright laws have changed quite a bit since 1981. I don't know if Compaq would have been able to legally clone the PC with today's laws.
If the circumstances were the same, only the time period and legal climate was changed, then yes they could. Clean room reverse engineering is still a legal and valid way to duplicate someone else's product, the only real change to this being the DMCA which wouldn't apply because the IBM BIOS did not include any access control mechanism.
However if IBM of today could send a note back in time detailing what they know today to IBM of 1980, then there's no way Compaq would succeed. They would have made sure through their licensing and business agreements that nobody could make a PC without the IBM BIOS. Their biggest mistake, the one they would most emphasize in their time-traveling letter, was not signing an exclusive deal for MS-DOS. It was because of this that when the clones appeared that Microsoft could sell MS-DOS to them, which is why over time the definition of PC changed from "IBM-compatible" to "runs a Microsoft OS". IBM lost control of the PC market and handed it to Microsoft because of that mistake.
I think clones would still have existed, once they also got a sufficiently compatible DOS. Prior to the arrival of clones, the PC market was much smaller, and maybe MS wouldn't have been able to play the tricks they did later to stymie DR-DOS and others. Would the world have been better off with IBM PCs running MS-DOS and "IBM compatible" PCs running NOTMS-DOS? I think so.
Given the number of people who defend Steam on/. I think he's probably right about people not caring about the DRM.
Most people don't care about DRM as long as they don't notice it, and that includes/.ers. Some care based solely on principle, some care because they don't trust any DRM to be unnoticeable. Most just want to play a game they paid for, and if DRM doesn't stop them from doing that then no, they don't care. There are no articles about xbox DRM because you never see it, you stick a game into your console and it plays.
Steam's DRM is mostly harmless, most of the time. Thus it falls beneath most people's thresholds of caring. When it actually breaks, like the AC post above describes, then damned right people will care even if they didn't even know what DRM was before. They may even become distrustful of DRM in general. That won't necessarily affect the opinions of people for whom it is working.
So I think he is right, to the extent that DRM is done "right" and is unobtrusive and doesn't break your games. As time goes on, as DRM becomes more common, and more people get bit by it, then there will be more people who will consider the potential for DRM to break their games, and more people will care.
Yeah, haha. Now think for a couple seconds about actually performing phone-directed surgery, and maybe you'll see an advantage or two to using text instead of voice.
So... a robot that is so close to being human that it is nigh impossible to distinguish it from a human, yet is clearly still a machine that can be programmed or have its memory downloaded to a distant ship when it dies, and is biologically capable of being fertilized by a human, and carrying the resulting offspring to term, resulting in a half-human/half-cyborg baby, that's all good ol' sci-fi.
But when that baby's blood somehow cures cancer, that's a miracle?
Kay. Some people's lines of suspension of belief don't make sense to me; seems to me that if that's a miracle, then there were about a dozen pre-requisite miracles earlier in the show. Is it really that you just thought she should die on schedule?
I was more annoyed that the cylon-killing virus that could be downloaded to their resurrection ships was actually a normal biological virus humans were now immune to. Okay so the "bio-electric" effect that kills them may get downloaded to the resurrection ship, but without the actual virus around how would it infect other cylons? Zomg, you're right, it's fantasy. This show sucks.
To be honest, I'd still be using ext2 if Redhat hadn't made ext3 the default.
Well thank goodness RedHat saved you from yourself, then!
It's not about performance, it's about journaling. Ext3 has it, ext2 doesn't, ergo by modern standards ext2 is crap. The only justification for using it was when the only journaling file systems for linux were unstable.
Microsoft is an excellent mouse-making company. It's a shame people keep complaining about their failed OS sideline.
I've always thought it was funny how Microsoft would always emphatically insist that they were not a hardware company, while their hardware input devices, especially their flight sticks but also mice, keyboards, and game pads, are some of the best-in-breed.
I guess at Microsoft it's considered shameful to have a product that nobody is forced to buy, but people do anyway simply because it's very good at doing its job. No wonder they stopped making joysticks.
If you care about your conversational etiquette so much that you have to say "hold on a second" in a difficult driving situation you shouldn't talk at all while driving, even with a hands free system. I think that is the root of the problem.
No, thinking that saying or not saying those words is the difference between you being substantially distracted or not is the root of the problem. My point was that situations can change and accidents can happen quickly, not that saying those six words causes accidents! Sheesh. Whether you're talking on the phone or merely listening, you are going to be distracted and not as aware of the situation around you, no matter what it "feels" like. So do everyone a favor, don't shut up, hang up.
Meh. It'll be a standard procedure in 5 years... This stuff isn't that revolutionary.. it's just a neat trick to stop you getting brain damage when you're not getting enough oxygen.
Are you kidding? This is revolutionary, and that's exactly why it'll be standard procedure in 5 years. A "neat trick" like that could save a lot of lives that were previously lost causes, maybe reduce risk in other cases too. But then again I think endoscopic surgery was revolutionary too.
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I think you are missing the point, but just barely: software is a set of instructions, like formulae are. Formulae are instructions on how to reach a sum, and software is a set of instructions on how to set circuits inside a computer. They are alike, but not entirely the same.
Close, but not quite. Software is a set of instructions on how to reach a mathematical result. You will not find anything in the definition of an x86 ADD instruction that refers to circuits or necessarily requires them. You can perform that ADD instruction completely correctly using a software simulator, or even by hand. The only difference between the language of math in a textbook and the language of math in a software instruction set is that the latter is designed to be read by a computer, but this need not be the case.
Computer vs human readability. That's the only difference between software and hand-written mathematical instructions. Both are formulas, both are math.
The other thing to realise is the magnitude of complexity in software means that emergence kicks in: the set of instructions begins to behave like a physical object, and engineering approaches gradually apply. Sure, there are maths in there, but it's no longer so relevant to the design of the set of instructions. Refining and redesigning the code becomes more analogue to engineering, redesigning a structure for better performance and so on.
Complexity will never make math not-math. Emergency is an aspect of math, not an escape from it. Of course you will be concerned with the physical practicalities of your formula, that doesn't mean a formula is now something else. Or have you never re-factored a hand-written algorithm to be more efficient or convenient to calculate by hand? The initial justification for the electronic computer was because human computers weren't fast enough at calculating artillery trajectories. How did changing from doing the calculations with pen and paper and a human brain, to doing them by an electronic device, change those calculations from a formula to a not-formula? What about when they decided to increase efficiency by hiring whole rooms of computers (in the original sense of a human being tasked with computation), is that when it became not-math?
It's easy to forget this since the first purpose of computers was to compute. Solve mathematical problems. But modern usage of these machines has gone beyond that, so seeing the set of instructions we call software as merely mathematical formulae cheapens the term "formula".
It's easy to forget that that's all a computer program is doing today. Thanks to hardware some of those calculations have effects other than the simple computation, but the software has no idea that when it assigns a value to a particular location in a matrix that a piece of hardware is going to use that value to control the output of a cathode ray tube. As far as the software is concerned -- and more importantly, defined -- it's doing nothing but calculations and assignments. Frankly I think you're the one cheapening the term "formula" by limiting it to simple hand-written calculations of sums.
There's no reason every person on earth needs an IP. Nat+uPNP is perfectly capable and 100% backwords compatible.
Yeah, unless you still hold out hopes that the internet could live up to its original promise of being a network of peers, where a person's home computer could be their server when they are out.
Throwing people behind ever increasing layers of NAT erodes the functionality of the internet. If your goal is simply to disprove that IP addresses are running out, that may be acceptable. If you don't want to turn the internet into a series of essentially uni-directional gateways, then it isn't.
I want a static IP. And it's not even an unreasonable request, we have the solution right here, it's just going to take time to get adopted. So what's yer beef?
Frankly I have no idea since I don't have a laptop. :)
If I involuntarily said whatever I was thinking, my girlfriend would never stop slapping me.
As a fan of the book, that really kind of pissed me off. They started off by teasing us with a few moments of the single very best depiction of phalanx combat ever put to film and then abandonded it for the rest of the movie.
In the book they NEVER broke formation. That was practically the whole point of the story. Hell, that was practically the whole point of the entire fucking Spartan civilization!*
You're kidding me... So that was the director/screenwriter, not Frank Miller. Well that's good to know. Maybe I'll give the comic a read some time.
One will insist that, no matter how much memory is currently allocated, it makes more sense to swap out that which isn't needed in order to keep more free physical ram. They will argue until they are blue in the face that the benefits of doing so are good.
Essentially - your OS is clever and it tries pre-emptively swap things out so the memory will be available as needed.
Not exactly... It doesn't swap things out so the memory is free just in case an active application decides it needs it. The OS pre-emptively swaps things out so that the memory can be immediately used for useful things like a file cache (which can be instantly discarded in case an application needs it).
If the page utilization and file caching algorithms work correctly for your usage pattern, then this is undoubtedly a benefit to performance. And the algorithms are good, so they do apply to a wide variety of cases. Hopefully I don't have to argue until I'm blue in the face to convince you of this.
I run most of my workstations (Windows) without virtual memory. Yes, on occasion, I do hit a "low on virtual memory error" - usually when something is leaky - but I prefer to get the error and have to re-start or kill something rather than have the system spend days getting progressively slower, slowly annoying me more and more, and then giving me the same error.
The days where swap was used primarily to increase the effective amount of memory you had for running applications are long gone. It made some sense back then, for several reasons. First, even when 16MB was considered "a lot", few people considered it enough. Having a way to use more was handy when running Paint Shop Pro. Second, the relative speed of disk and memory was closer than it is today. Not exactly close, but a lot closer than today. Third, the amount of memory being handled was smaller. Disks speed has increased nearly as quickly as disk size and memory size. So doubling your effective memory by swapping that entire 16MB to disk is a much, much faster operation than doing the same with 1GB of RAM today.
But I agree with what you are saying regarding those actual low-memory situations and how you'd much rather kill them before they got around to needed all that disk space for swap. I have two thoughts on that. One is that old rules of thumb like "use swap equal to your physical RAM" need to go. You don't need 2GB of swap space if you have 2GB of RAM. You wouldn't want to use that much swap in most cases. I use a value like 256MB.
My second thought is that it might be a good idea to separate these two usage models of swap. Being able to swap out unused application pages to make room for file cache can be a good thing. Using swap because an application is demanding more memory than is physically available is probably not what you want, and is a great way to end up with an unresponsive thrashing system. It would be nice to be able to have the first feature, but have the application in the second case get an out of memory error. This thought, though, is pretty half-baked, so I'm not exactly going to go email my nearest kernel developer with the idea.
All I got was a fscking fly. :(
I'm not "brainwashed" by bad examples. I'm talking about, and am only against, as I explicitly stated, the bad examples.
Feeding someone today, at the cost of the right for them to control their own food sources in the future, and eliminating the foundation of millennia of agriculture in the right to plant seeds from last year's crop, is not "good work". It's an act of cruelty and enslavement. It's the "good work" of the devil, taking advantage of the desperate in order to control them. Some African countries have been rejecting aid that came in the form of Monsanto's Terminator breeds for exactly that reason.
When we aren't talking about DRMed food, then it's a completely different story. But right now, that's not the story the largest GM crop producer wants to tell.
The newly-created one that has the huge incentive of customer demand for cheaper products.
Oh yes, I forget that in Free Market Theory, a new company will spontaneously spring into existence regardless of any barriers to entry either inherent in the industry or set up by the trust in question. And, despite the fact that in this universe the SEC doesn't exist, this new company isn't immediately purchased, or simply bribed into colluding with the others.
Reality doesn't work that way. Maybe, eventually, that will happen, but in the mean time a great deal of damage has been done. Damage that could have been prevented just by eliminating the broken corner case.
The problem with this whole debate is the pragmatic, unprincipled approach taken by everyone opposing the free market
Principles without pragmatism are worse than useless, not only do they as a matter of course fail to achieve the principled objective, they frequently result in the opposite outcome. For example, the principle behind anarcho-capitalism is maximal freedom for all with minimal restrictions, but it's a system that essentially turns into feudalism very quickly. When contract law is the only law, creating a serfdom is as easy as finding people who don't have the option to leave and negotiate with someone else for the necessities you provide.
By promoting the violation of Google's employee's rights through government intervention, you promote the violation of your own rights.
But I don't think I have the "right" to form an abusive trust any more than I think I have the "right" to own slaves, so I'm not worried if violating that "right" of the people Google means I will lose that "right" too.
Or is this a slippery slope argument? If anti-trust laws are enforced, if banks and securities are regulated, then naturally this means I'll lose my freedom of religion? What is the basis for that? Is it not more likely that this would only encourage the violation of some related rights, which many of us may not consider to be rights at all?
The rented midgets are judgmental too. Little pricks.
What we really need is more research into GM crops which the environmentalists hate for some reason.
I consider myself an environmentalist, but I'm not against GM crops per-se. I'm against the most prominent examples of how they've actually been implemented and the companies responsible.
Basically, it comes down to this: If DRM is a bad idea for software, it's a fucking insanely retarded thing for food crops.
Not only did I invent a device which would correctly diagnose cancer 99.999% of the time, not only did it work in only half an hour, it also didn't involve any of this expensive magnetic nanotechnology la-dee-dah. Plus the device was so ridiculously simple anybody could use it, which you'll see once I describe the device itself.
Basically it's a big box, kinda like a front-loading washing machine. In front of the box is the scanning aperture. On top of the box is a single button labeled "Detect Cancer". You stand in front of the scanning aperture, and you hit the button. Over the next half hour, the box scans you with very high levels of x-rays. Once the scanning was done the only other feature on the top of the box, a green LED with a label that says "Cancer Detected", would light up.
You see, so simple a child could use it! I should know, too, because I had some try it out. But those bastards at the FDA brushed me off, even threatening me if I continued performing clinical trials! Even after I showed them it had the same accuracy detecting radiation burns and radiation sickness! But what do you expect from bureaucrats? More concerned with their "rules" and "regulations" than helping people. I wouldn't be surprised if this new one gets a pass because being hard to build and complicated to use they can regulate the hell out of it, even if it is inferior. :(
You might think it's common sense that marketshare is all that matters, but we hammered this out years ago when comparing attack rates on IIS vs Apache.
Obviously marketshare is a factor. Ease of infiltration is another factor. A more popular platform will be attacked less if the chance of success is lower, because at the end of the day going after the weaker but less popular platform can still net you more compromised systems. If you only look at desktop browsers and OSes, you might not think this is the case, but that's only because right now the most popular program and the most vulnerable program are the same, and that the up-and-coming browser can only claim to be better than the most popular one on security issues, not actually good.
In any case, common sense should not be telling you that the security of the program doesn't affect the number of hacks and viruses. Making the reasonable assumption that all code contains some number of bugs does not in any way imply that they are equally prevalent or equally easy to find in any given program, or that the time to discover the bugs is always the same and dependent only on desire. Exploring esoteric avenues of investigation because the incentive is so high does not guarantee a timely result. If it takes substantial time and effort to find an exploit, which is then fixed, requiring another substantial effort to find another exploit, then it may not be in the hackers interest to go after this target versus a lower profile one where exploits can be found faster and more frequently in spit of bug fixes.
Put succinctly: "the amount of hacks and viruses and malware on an os/ browser has absolutely nothing to do with anything other than marketshare" is trivially wrong, at its simplest you could say that the number of hacks and viruses is related to (marketshare * vulnerability).
I wasn't talking about Apple. I was talking about the IBM's BIOS from the 80s, which did not have an access control mechanism.
In fact, I'd call it one of the truest representations of the ancient Greek epic storytelling style to ever see the big screen. Since I'm guessing that was the whole point, I'm gonna go ahead and call the movie really damn good, not just as an action movie, but as an expression of art.
Disagree? Go look at the fight scenes in the Iliad and watch the movie again with that in mind. The somewhat fantastic animals, the way the heroes were larger-than-life, the fights over a fallen comrade, the caricatured enemy--it is exactly the way you'd expect a somewhat-talented ancient Greek storyteller to handle the tale.
Well that's all true, except the part where that makes it good. I had no problem with the fantastic battles or historical inaccuracies in and of themselves. It's that the result was, while pretty and kinda fun in parts, still mostly boring and pointless. "Done in the style of..." doesn't automatically make something good even if they do accurately ape the style. After all there was crap Greek storytelling too.
Okay, and I'll admit, I just really couldn't get over the way the traitor was handled. The King makes a big point of how he would be happy to have the aid of the deformed man's strong spear arm, but alas, he can't raise his shield arm well and the Spartans always fight in phalanxes, don't you know, where the man next to you depends on your shield, so sorry it just wouldn't work. Then the battle starts and they fight in phalanx formation for maybe five seconds before voluntarily abandoning it to fight bar-brawl style. I can't remember any times where someone's shield was used to protect someone other than the one holding it.
Not that I have a problem with them not fighting in formation; it was a video game beat-em-up (complete with boss fight) on the big screen. I don't care if they fight in phalanxes or not. But they shouldn't mention that piece of unnecessary historical accuracy as part of a pivotal plot point only to ignore it five minutes later. The King should have just said that hey, we'd love to have you, except Spartan warriors represent the pinnacle of the human form who fight using magic spear-fu, and you're a mutant freak. Then at least it would have been consistent.
Also, copyright laws have changed quite a bit since 1981. I don't know if Compaq would have been able to legally clone the PC with today's laws.
If the circumstances were the same, only the time period and legal climate was changed, then yes they could. Clean room reverse engineering is still a legal and valid way to duplicate someone else's product, the only real change to this being the DMCA which wouldn't apply because the IBM BIOS did not include any access control mechanism.
However if IBM of today could send a note back in time detailing what they know today to IBM of 1980, then there's no way Compaq would succeed. They would have made sure through their licensing and business agreements that nobody could make a PC without the IBM BIOS. Their biggest mistake, the one they would most emphasize in their time-traveling letter, was not signing an exclusive deal for MS-DOS. It was because of this that when the clones appeared that Microsoft could sell MS-DOS to them, which is why over time the definition of PC changed from "IBM-compatible" to "runs a Microsoft OS". IBM lost control of the PC market and handed it to Microsoft because of that mistake.
I think clones would still have existed, once they also got a sufficiently compatible DOS. Prior to the arrival of clones, the PC market was much smaller, and maybe MS wouldn't have been able to play the tricks they did later to stymie DR-DOS and others. Would the world have been better off with IBM PCs running MS-DOS and "IBM compatible" PCs running NOTMS-DOS? I think so.
Given the number of people who defend Steam on /. I think he's probably right about people not caring about the DRM.
Most people don't care about DRM as long as they don't notice it, and that includes /.ers. Some care based solely on principle, some care because they don't trust any DRM to be unnoticeable. Most just want to play a game they paid for, and if DRM doesn't stop them from doing that then no, they don't care. There are no articles about xbox DRM because you never see it, you stick a game into your console and it plays.
Steam's DRM is mostly harmless, most of the time. Thus it falls beneath most people's thresholds of caring. When it actually breaks, like the AC post above describes, then damned right people will care even if they didn't even know what DRM was before. They may even become distrustful of DRM in general. That won't necessarily affect the opinions of people for whom it is working.
So I think he is right, to the extent that DRM is done "right" and is unobtrusive and doesn't break your games. As time goes on, as DRM becomes more common, and more people get bit by it, then there will be more people who will consider the potential for DRM to break their games, and more people will care.
Yeah, haha. Now think for a couple seconds about actually performing phone-directed surgery, and maybe you'll see an advantage or two to using text instead of voice.
If you want really high ratings, use a girl from one family and a girl from the other...
And sell the show to Cinemax...
So... a robot that is so close to being human that it is nigh impossible to distinguish it from a human, yet is clearly still a machine that can be programmed or have its memory downloaded to a distant ship when it dies, and is biologically capable of being fertilized by a human, and carrying the resulting offspring to term, resulting in a half-human/half-cyborg baby, that's all good ol' sci-fi.
But when that baby's blood somehow cures cancer, that's a miracle?
Kay. Some people's lines of suspension of belief don't make sense to me; seems to me that if that's a miracle, then there were about a dozen pre-requisite miracles earlier in the show. Is it really that you just thought she should die on schedule?
I was more annoyed that the cylon-killing virus that could be downloaded to their resurrection ships was actually a normal biological virus humans were now immune to. Okay so the "bio-electric" effect that kills them may get downloaded to the resurrection ship, but without the actual virus around how would it infect other cylons? Zomg, you're right, it's fantasy. This show sucks.
Lets not even get into what FOX did to Firefly...
"Our friend was raped! And we let it happen!"
"Dude! There was nothing you could do!"
To be honest, I'd still be using ext2 if Redhat hadn't made ext3 the default.
Well thank goodness RedHat saved you from yourself, then!
It's not about performance, it's about journaling. Ext3 has it, ext2 doesn't, ergo by modern standards ext2 is crap. The only justification for using it was when the only journaling file systems for linux were unstable.
Microsoft is an excellent mouse-making company. It's a shame people keep complaining about their failed OS sideline.
I've always thought it was funny how Microsoft would always emphatically insist that they were not a hardware company, while their hardware input devices, especially their flight sticks but also mice, keyboards, and game pads, are some of the best-in-breed.
I guess at Microsoft it's considered shameful to have a product that nobody is forced to buy, but people do anyway simply because it's very good at doing its job. No wonder they stopped making joysticks.
If you care about your conversational etiquette so much that you have to say "hold on a second" in a difficult driving situation you shouldn't talk at all while driving, even with a hands free system. I think that is the root of the problem.
No, thinking that saying or not saying those words is the difference between you being substantially distracted or not is the root of the problem. My point was that situations can change and accidents can happen quickly, not that saying those six words causes accidents! Sheesh. Whether you're talking on the phone or merely listening, you are going to be distracted and not as aware of the situation around you, no matter what it "feels" like. So do everyone a favor, don't shut up, hang up.
Meh. It'll be a standard procedure in 5 years... This stuff isn't that revolutionary.. it's just a neat trick to stop you getting brain damage when you're not getting enough oxygen.
Are you kidding? This is revolutionary, and that's exactly why it'll be standard procedure in 5 years. A "neat trick" like that could save a lot of lives that were previously lost causes, maybe reduce risk in other cases too. But then again I think endoscopic surgery was revolutionary too.